Reginald Gibbons
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Inter-Zoetic
Long erosion has carved its say
on exposed steep
massively tumbled rocky slopes.
Bright splotched lichen
epigrams, yellow, purple, red—
eloquent on
the extraordinary is-ness
of existence.
What was once vast sea-bed is now
coastal plains in-
habited by the breathing green-
ery and high-
er critters—domesticated,
wild, and human.
Where bull-dozed sedimentary
hills give up shards
of ammonites and trilobites
and other strange
creatures whose long-dead shells seem close
to us—unlike
stars, whose lives are of such an in-
conceivable
length, incomprehensible reach.
Conceivably,
sea-shrinking created inlands,
prairies, and scoured
riverbeds, river-water paths
still explore flat-
lands and look up at shallow caves
that still show us
time-worn human art depicting
bison, horses,
elks, lions, warriors, eagles, sun,
comets, moon, big-
horn sheep, human hands, arrows and
bows, stars, mammoths,
gods, snakes. And in deep torch-lit caves,
too. Just as then,
near marshes and lakes and streams, shrieks
and melodies
and yelps fill the air, and growls and
urgent howling.
Humble short-lived bugs, delicate
frogs, bright and dull
birds, squat toads and mammals of all
sizes have their
anthems, their short sagas, their calls
of longing soft
or loud, amidst leaves, ants, blossoms,
bats, lizards, roots,
berries, spirits—all of these do
declare and prove
that they are much more endangered
than are we our-
selves. So creatures sometimes shout or
shriek and listen,
calling and called. Those that sing, sing.
Some quieten
themselves. All those that whisper—as
we too whisper—
we must listen for. As do they.
The only voice
that is eternal is the wind.
Reginald Gibbons was born in Houston and grew up there. His BA (Princeton) was in Spanish and Portuguese; his MA (Stanford) was in English and Creative Writing, and his PhD (Stanford) was in Comparative Literature. He has published eleven books of poems, most recently RENDITIONS (Four Way Books 2021). His book of poems CREATURES OF A DAY (LSU Press 2008) was a Finalist for the National Book Award. His other awards include three from the Texas Institute of Letters; the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library; and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation (Spain), the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Center for Hellenic Studies (Wash. D.C.). His novel SWEETBITTER (1995) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and has been reissued in paperback three times, most recently by JackLeg Press (2023). His book THREE POEMS will be published in 2024 by Finishing Line Press, and another book of poems, YOUNG WOMAN WITH A CANE will be published in 2025 by LSU Press. His translations and co-translations of poetry include Sophocles’ ANTIGONE, Euripides’ BAKKHAI, Sophocles’ SELECTED POEMS: ODES AND FRAGMENTS, and the Spanish poets Jorge Guillén and Luis Cernuda, as well as a number of Mexican poets. With the Russian poet Ilya Kutik, Gibbons has co-translated SELECTED POEMS OF BORIS PASTERNAK, SELECTED POEMS OF MARINA TSVETAEVA, and is completing a volume of SELECTED POEMS of Ilya Kutik. (These three books will soon be submitted to publishers.) Gibbons has taught creative writing at Columbia, Princeton, the Warren Wilson MFA program, and at Northwestern, where he was also the editor of TriQuarterly Magazine (1981-97). He founded the part-time MFA in Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies and co-founded the full-time Litowitz MFA+MA in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is currently at work on a book of linked short stories and a new book about poetry (his book HOW POEMS THINK was published by Univ. of Chicago Press in 2015).